Hauser and Wirth’s press statement for the new Ida Appelbroog exhibition, Monalisa, draws parallels between the artist and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). Unfortunately, Woolf’s room for seclusion and creativity was only possible for those who could afford it. For everyone else the only place to find solitude is the bathroom. And that is where this exhibition begins in 1969, in a bathroom.
Creating a mythic vision of her creative impulse, Appelbroog sets the scene of living in southern California with her husband and four children and not having a space to call her own. So she retreats to the bathroom as a “little sanctuary” where for two to three hours each evening she could go about sketching her crotch from reflections in a mirror. She produced some 160 drawings in a ritualistic act akin to Tee Corinne’s “Cunt Coloring Book.” Corinne asked women to not only be comfortable looking at vaginas, but also to take a good long look at their own and even draw and color them. This exercise would allow women to understand themselves and their bodies. Appelbroog’s exhibition reinvigorates the feminist gusto for the taboo.
The exhibition presents a certain bravado that has only just recently been resurrected in the history of feminist art. Art institutions are beginning to recognize these pioneering works from the 1960s and 1970s that challenged the social order. As such Lynda Benglais, Ana Mendiata and Hannah Wilke have enjoyed a renaissance of interest and scholarship. Like them, Appelbroog’s images are a reversal of traditional representations of womanhood. They are Courbet’s Origin of the World turned in on itself. No longer do we gaze at the vagina, but now the vagina gazes at us. Some of Appelbroog’s images are highly detailed with pubic hair accurately rendered, while others are much more abstract with elegantly curved lines sweeping across the paper.
The centerpiece of this exhibition is a room-sized wooden structure covered with more than one-hundred facsimiles of the vagina images. Applebroog scanned, enlarged and digitally manipulated the drawings on vellum and soaked them in translucent coats of blues, yellows and reds. The bathroom sanctuary gives way to an impenetrable fortress with the haunting gaze of vaginas watching as visitors peer into a space they can never enter. There is no door but only gaps between the paper and bare wooden structure of the room. These slits offer a view of a large painting, Monalisa, which hangs on an interior wall. The painting made in deep red is of a slouched over figure, looking like a rag doll, with its legs spread open. Like the wallpapered vulva images, the doll gazes uncomfortably at the viewer as if disturbed by their presence. This guarded room has parallels to Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnés, which was made public for the first time in 1969 the same year these drawings were begun. However, again, like Courbet’s famous canvas, the gaze has been reversed. Duchamp’s lifeless figure spreads her legs but we cannot see her face, masking if she is uncomfortable or complacent in the peep show. Appelbroog’s figure, on the other hand, challenges us to keep looking and follows us as we exam the room that we are not permitted to access. The artist brilliantly weaves together her past and present. By including digitally made drawings, she demonstrates that artists even in their late years can produce new and surprisingly engaging work. Monalisa is not a variation on a theme but Appelbroog’s own renaissance in the art world.
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